Falcon4

Didn't think it deserved a new topic... but OMG! I can't believe it! I finally got a feature named after me! Yay! After all the *counts... 1... 2...* handful of little bug reports and feedback I've submitted a couple years ago... yay! I dunno if I can use it just yet, with many private trackers blocking uberbeta versions of uTorrent (and I imagine they've got good reason to block a centralized web-access version of uT), but hey. If I can put in one feature request... keep the name the same Now it just needs a kickass logo to go along with the kickass name, and it'll be all-around a huge load of kickass.

Yay, hopefully this resolves the crash-sessions I sometimes encountered. Also noticed in the log that the local peer disk congestion problem is finally addressed... I quit using uT for local torrents because the problems were so great with it eating up all available (and in the case of having swap enabled, unavailable) memory then crashing, when the network was faster than uT creating huge new data files. Such a pain in the rear, that bug was! Thanks much!

Lord Alderaan: Yeah, that's pretty much what I have to do to keep uTorrent from eating up every last byte of system memory automatically. I found that enabling the cache - my bug is with the cache disabled which I want on a controlled LAN torrent - actually fixes the problem. I just decided to set it low, like to 8mb, instead.

Cool, cool. I figured that was a very obvious glitch to be fixed soon, no sweat. But the disk cache thing? I can hardly use uTorrent with that problem... >.<

Bug in the latest 1.7 beta found... by curious accident. LAN torrent, very high speed, at least 5 computers running it (I'm trying to get the others started). I'm getting progress on other computers but no traffic being reported by the torrent on my laptop (the seed). Absolutely no upload is being reported by the speed limiter (it's going full LAN speed), status bar indicators, or torrent details. Download is registered though. I also seem to be unable to connect my single 1.6.1 client to any 1.7 peers on the LAN torrent... =\ edit: Oh... also... the computer's got two LAN adapters - internet goes in from wireless, then is shared with ICS onto the LAN. It could be looking at only one network connection... edit: Another bug... I disabled read/write caching on one computer - the two default read/write checkboxes unchecked - in order to reduce RAM usage on a LAN torrent - and what do I find? OMG! It crashed the system with a massive, massive, uncontrolled "cache"! edit edit edit: Strange, it shows Disk Overloaded 100%, yet it continues downloading, increasing RAM usage like crazy as the HDD gets distracted by swapping, until I pause it and it writes the data to the disk... ugh. Attended downloads = SUCK.

At least a full year later and UPnP is stiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllll broken... T_______T With absolutely no clues whatsoever as to what it was doing and why it failed... even lesser so than 1.5's UPnP! Just "Something went wrong"! Come on, Microsoft! Tell us something more useful... C'mon, can't we have an XP UPnP fallback?! It worked in 1.5 with the XP UPnP... And whatever happened to utorrent.com's "The lightweight and efficient BitTorrent Client"? "Powerful BitTorrent Client" sucks! Lightweight and efficient is the epitome of everything uTorrent stands for, and the reason I use it... now it's just Azureus?

Waaaaahhh... UPnP still doesn't work. T___T (and the error reporting is still DISGUSTINGLY terse! Come on, can't I at least get my IP address and port mentioned in the log?) Windows XP UPnP fallback, anyone?

I would, but I get banned too often. =P

A good ol' %(%*@#$(*@!734982759#*$&@$#(*&%#(*$$##*()$@... What?!! O_O (FWIW, I'm no noob to coding... really.)

Oh cmon, can't I be considered above "public"? I'm a little smarter at beta-testing than the idiot "ugh why my rar does are not play" grunting public... edit: oh... well, I forgot... uT isn't developed by a person anymore, it's developed by a corporation. I don't have a chance in hell. =(

Not to mention regex is a bitch to get anything done... you know how long it took me to figure out how to tell mod_rewrite to rewrite /s.php/i/foo.gif to /s.php?i=foo.gif? It's like building an airplane or something. So much easier to just do search and replace or something...there has GOT to be a more understandable alternative to regex. >.< BTW, I may be falling off the face of the planet in a few months and I would really like to try uT 1.7 before my life essentially ends...

I LOVE YOU!!!! Can I be the first to beta it since I've probably been the most vocal asshole about it? =P (Oh, and if you must, you -can- email me if you don't want a wild uprising of idiot n00bs asking for beta invites "plz"... )

Never thought I'd say this, but here I am in Ubuntu with the ugliest-ass version of uTorrent I've ever set my eyes on... working. Had to fuck around with a few different options... funny how Wine emulates disk drives. At least I was able to painlessly move my torrents over from the Windows versions of everything... kinda nice seeing teh U running under teh Tux. BEHOLD! SCREENSHOTTY! Isn't it cute?

It must have been changed to "on by default" then, because I fired up the new beta expecting a bug-fix release, and found this new bar on by default! It kicks ass, but I'm wondering why it wasn't mentioned in the changelog because I moved from 426 to 427 and voila, a change!

WOW, okay, the new beta (427) has an awesome new feature, that little "category" bar off to the left side... ... My only question is... why wasn't this noted in the changelog?!

Now, wait, when it says "Fix: Don't behave incorrectly if 0-byte files are deleted by the user", is that addressing my problem with 0-byte files? =\ I guess I can test it out... this fix should fix the problem I had, but, well, I guess I'll find out. w00t for teh new betaz !!!!111

Holy crap Kazuaki, that was a nice write-up! Great read. My testimonial is a little different. I started with the Official, just like everyone else (I think...), but quickly moved to Shad0w's client. Then I moved to ABC when I got sick of every torrent taking an instance of the client. From ABC I experimented with BitComet but quickly gave that up (couldn't stand the interface) and moved to... you guessed it... Azureus. Azureus was like God to bittorrent. It had all kinds of options and features... so many I could no longer let anyone use anything BUT Azureus. I preached it everywhere, and worked like crazy to get people switched from BitComet (the well-defended but shitty client) and the others (which were too small and functionless for people to defend). It had a ton of features and there were very few torrents I couldn't complete. I even completed a 600mb game torrent on Azureus over hotel dialup over the course of a few weeks. A lot of the time, Azureus ran on my 850MHz laptop with 256mb RAM. If I didn't have the swap file enabled, I could only run Azureus and... well... Azureus. So I almost always had my ugly damn swap file turned on to have enough RAM to contain this beast. CPU usage was only a problem when it was rechecking files. Later, I started using my desktop with (now) 640MB RAM, mainly because my laptop fell apart (it can't even be used as a laptop anymore...). But with 640mb RAM it was very comfortable to leave the swap disabled all the time and run on pure RAM. Except when Azureus was running. Azureus used to be a small program. It almost seemed like it was a compiled, optimized C++ program running under a Java fake cover. But with every new release and every "fix" or half-feature, its memory usage grew... and grew... and grew. In the clients list, one day I saw a few clients with some string of gibberish... it didn't say µTorrent/1400 like it does now, it said something like @#$%*fbdeabutorrent1200@#. I don't rightly remember, but somehow I picked out that it was "utorrent". I found the µTorrent page, but didn't give two thoughts about it and comfortably went back to Azureus. Later, when it showed up as µTorrent, I gave that second thought and figured, what the hell, why not give it a try? I downloaded it and ran it from the download temp folder (not knowing it wouldn't install itself) and instead of an installer, I saw a HUGE interface that just made my jaw hit the floor. Of course my head was scrambled as to how to un-do having it installed in my temp folder (with the desktop shortcut now pointing there) and thinking about how awesome this new program is... but I tried it out, I loaded all of Azureus' old torrents into it, pointed them to the right folders, and let it do its work. The first thing that amazed me was that my CPU was barely even noticing that it was doing hash checking. The USB drives were cranking out maximum bandwidth (I'd never seen them reading that fast) and the internal-drive-loaded torrents were reading at like 40MB/s. It was a stunning sight. Immediately, I was hooked. In Azureus, I had a "keepalive" set of rules set up to where when a torrent had less than 2 seeds, run constantly; if a torrent had more than 2 seeds and 1 peer, stop. I ran my "completed and ratio OK" torrents like this, and put my "still need to run" torrents on always-on mode. Unfortunately there was no such function in µTorrent... I'm still hoping to see this type of "queue rules" functionality in µTorrent eventually... µTorrent was also happy with the way I made hardlinked files on the drive to seed to multiple sites with similar data. That was a great way to save space on my drive and still be active on multiple private trackers. It worked great. In my later reformat/reinstall, Java wasn't even installed. I'm permanently hooked on µTorrent.

Like I said, and so it begins. Ludde, the dev of µT, likes to put little timed messages in µT. Last one was around Xmas, when people started freaking out, "OH MY GOD MY COMPUTER STARTED PLAYING XMAS MUSIK!!!111". It's not a bug, not a virus, not anything to worry about, it's just a timed window that everyone saw, that told people about not paying for µT. I'm sure people have paid for it - if they've paid for a rebranded Shareaza (I've seen it myself), people will surely sell another popular client like µT. So just chill. If you didn't buy it from someone, you're OK. How did I know people would freak out about this?

And so it begins.

Scuse me while I pop in a minute. The part about DMA caught my eye as someone that really knew more than the average idiot "tech support"-kinda guy. It's really nice that you know about DMA and whatnot... most people think their computer is just completely slow when they just have some bad settings. I've taken it a step further, though, and a long time ago when my HDD controller driver was acting up, Windows would always revert the drive to Multi-Word DMA Mode 1 or something like that. I searched long and hard all across the Internets and found a solution. There's a registry key that Windows reads whenever a mode change is requested, that limits the maximum speed for a controller or device. When you set the mode to PIO Only then back to DMA If Available, the "If Available" is read from the registry, then from the drive itself. If the registry says you can only do slow DMA, that'll be all you can do. Before performing this, be sure you have WORKING CABLES. Bad cables are a prime cause of hard drive problems and corruption - those tiny wires in the 80-conductor cables go bad on a regular basis - I had a whole box full of bad IDE cables. It's a serious problem. So here's a little snippet from my extremely popular, but not yet publicized "Tools Folder". http://www.hostfile.org/FixDMA.rar Inside there is a registry file that writes ffffffff, the highest value (also the default) to the two typical locations for a drive controller in the registry. Because of different drive configurations, YMMV. After running this reg file, go to the device manager as noted in the guide, and instead of setting to DMA If Available, set to PIO. Click OK, go back to the properties and select DMA again. Now Windows will (on the fly most of the time) set the transfer mode to the highest supported speed. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0002] "MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed"=dword:ffffffff [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0001] "MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed"=dword:ffffffff Simple as that. It'll really help when you're running a LAN torrent!

Makes sense... I admit that was a silly proposition. But what about making it optional in the settings? Like, to use ANSI instead of Unicode? Perhaps I should just ask how it affects its memory usage. I assume that to a lot of people, a small sacrifice in memory usage is a great tradeoff for Unicode capability, but for people like me and countless others in the US who only use ANSI (or, standard Windows) characters, that tradeoff has no payoff.

Are there any plans to split uTorrent into a Unicode and non-Unicode version (as when I saw "Unicode" on the download page, I was then searching for a "non-Unicode" alternative)? I know I don't EVER need Unicode capability, and Unicode takes slightly more than twice the space to store data. To me it's rather redundant and useless for my purposes... Or maybe it can be switched on/off? ... Or, rather, maybe I should ask... how is Unicode used in uTorrent anyway?

This is beyond awesome. It seems to have taken a LOT of ideas from Azureus (for once!), which makes for an UNBELIEVABLY smooth transition from that absolute bloatware that Azureus has become. I run without a swap file, for extreme performance, and with 640mb RAM it's hard to juggle Firefox, Azureus, Windows Media Encoder for my EtiVo server cluster, and Photoshop at the same time. Literally, it just can't be done. When Azureus knocked out Firefox while I was a µsec away from clicking the "Submit Listing" button, it was the last straw. I had heard of µTorrent before, but I never put any thought into it 'til now. BitComet can suck my balls. Its stripped down and confusing interface is worthless. µTorrent checks my files so fast, I can benchmark hard drives with it. With Azureus, CPU usage was always 100% while it checked files (meaning the CPU is the bottleneck, not the HDD performance). µTorrent is an efficient, TINY (smaller than some driver craplets!) program that packs a serious punch!!! THANK YOU for this EXCELLENT program!!!

Last page sucks, bumping to top of page #5... (I'm such an attention whore.)